Google Personalizes Home Page, Vies With Major Portals

During its first-ever "factory tour" held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. and broadcast Web-wide, Google brass Thursday unveiled a number of new products and initiatives, including a customizable home page for its main search offering. The new home page allows users to add weather, news, movie times, and Gmail access, bringing it much closer to portal companies Yahoo! and MSN. The customizable home page is the first in a series of products stemming from a new Google initiative dubbed "Fusion." Marissa Meyer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said that Fusion aims to satisfy consumer demand for integration of all of Google's various services into one interface. -- Shankar Gupta